The Theme of ‘Relevance’ Within Digital PR

Relevance is a current buzzword in the PR world, but what does it mean? 

Being relevant is all about topical alignment and telling closely connected stories that make sense to the brand. 

So, how can we ensure the campaigns, journalists, and links are as relevant to our client as possible? 

Ensuring your campaign is right for the client 

It’s important your coverage is relevant to the brand and the initial concept makes logical sense. If you’re working on a travel client, a campaign on travel hotspots is on the money, but a campaign on corporate travel or aviation jobs may be a stretch. 

At this point, it’s important to consider how your campaign can help brand awareness, click-through rate, and association with publications to help clients and boost sales and revenue. 

But how do we do this? 

Prior to ideation, ask your client for any target and dream publications and do some desk research to find out where your client and their competition have previously been featured.

This will help you build a list of target publications. Once you do this, research what they cover by looking at website and homepage views, along with the topics and themes that are trending. 

Seeing what stories your target publications frequently cover will allow you to expand your idea pool and help the ideation process. This also ensures you pitch relevant stories that fit within their niches, ultimately increasing your chances of landing on them as your angles are more likely to spark interest with a journalist. 

By landing on dream publications, you will help drive links that are likely to be clicked and get people talking — the links that will make the most impact. So, the more relevant the topic is to the people reading that article and publication, the more click-throughs and traffic the client will see.

How likely is it that your campaign will be remembered? 

If the campaign isn’t memorable and related to both the client and publication, it can often be a waste of time and resources. 

Each campaign should aim to be evergreen, with multiple angles and opportunities to be brought back into outreach throughout the year. 

So, how can we ensure a campaign stays relevant and how do we bring it back into outreach? These are the things you need to ask yourself:

• Have you launched every angle possible?
• Have you looked at opposite angles (e.g. positives and negatives)? 
• Can headlines be changed (including stats, figures and names)? 
• Are there interesting data points that haven’t been explored?
• Can data or expert commentary be added? 
• Are there awareness days or calendar events the campaign can tie into? 

The importance of WHY

Why is arguably the most important word in Digital PR, and with every campaign you produce, you should ask yourself, WHY NOW? Staying ahead of the news and thinking about key dates, awareness days, and trending topics allows you to understand how and why your campaign is relevant to the current media landscape. 

On top of this, you can invite your audience to understand why you have done the campaign and add credibility through an authoritative voice and expert commentary. This should be something new and beyond the obvious. Generic tips that everyone already knows are not going to excite a journalist. Think, do I know this, and why would people care? Do others already know this? If the answer is no, you are on the right lines. 

A great way to test a campaign is to speak to someone outside the PR world and your department. Does it make sense to them, and are they interested in knowing more? 

SEO and link relevancy 

In today’s world, we are more aware than ever of the relationship that SEOs and Digital PRs need to share, and SEO can be an important part of understanding the bigger picture behind why a link is relevant. 

Both PRs and SEOs care about the quality of a link and its longer-term goals. It’s interesting to note that a few highly relevant links provide more value than 100 non-relevant ones. SEOs need links relevant to the brand — it’s all about relevancy and quality over quantity. 

The relevancy SEOs are looking for;

• Publication quality
• Publication variety 
• Topic relevance 
• Brand sentiment

Ultimately, Google will reward links that are closely related to the site and publication. 

So, does relevance really matter? Undoubtedly yes! 

Need help enhancing your brand’s visibility? Get in touch with us today.